The funny thing here is that compared to DVD video, the quality loss introduced by macrovision-afflicted recording is only an incremental step more than that introduced by VHS.
If you're already happy watching grainy, low-res video with washed out colors, do you really care that the brightness goes up and down the whole time?
This is great, but is there an equivalent for audio?
I have a large collection of high-quality, digital audio recordings on CD. Is there a way that I can transfer these pristine recordings to a lossy, low-quality, non-random-access, fragile, progressively degrading magnetic medium? Something like audio cassettes would be ideal.
Oh, and if these stereo recordings can be converted to mono during the process, so much the better.
X! Sheesh. Forget X, if we're going to get rid of a letter, let's start with the bloody useless C. It has two pronunciations, both of which are handled already by another letter.
Look to the Indonesian national language, Bahasa Indonesia: they've done a smart thing and reassigned C to the 'ch' sound. We should just follow through and reassign X to 'sh'. And while we're at it, annex Y and use it for 'th'. Bingo: we've gotten rid of three useless letters and made "h" mostly unambiguous.
I mean come on, aren't we all fed up with pundits pontificating on "The end of X" by now?
Yeah! It's a very flexible windowing system, and has stood the test of time.
Re:Copy of note to Motorala
on
R.I.P. Iridium
·
· Score: 2
I am prepared to offer $100.00 US for your satellite network.
I'm sure that the organization would be happy to sell you the hardware for that price. They would probably include for free in the offer the responsibility for whatever ridiculous debt they've accumulated.
As I understand it, Microsoft doesn't want to make the system because; a) they're a software company, and b) there's no money in it. They just want to produce a specification and license it to third-party manufacturers.
Where did you hear this?
The economics of game consoles are pretty well understood now. You have to build the box yourself and sell it at a significant loss, and make up the difference selling licenses and producing 1st party games. You can't attempt to even break even on the box, or it'll be way too expensive.
The only company I can recall that's tried a different model is 3DO, and all the companies involved in that (I think Panasonic was the only company to make a box. Creative made a PC card version) got burned pretty badly.
> Anyway, Open Audio Library will signal the > beginning of a true cross platform 3D audio > system. Hopefully it provides more functionality > than Microsofts proprietary single platfrom DirectAudio(?) > system, otherwise it will be hard to get companies to switch over.
I don't see the benefit of doing something like that when you can just have standard sound from multiple speakers. Just take one speaker and put in on one side of the room and another and the other then you have sterophonic sound. Largely unless the sounds are intensely more complex your mind will associate the sound comming from different sources and allow for the "3d" effect.
Huh? So 3D sound isn't necessary, so we don't need an API? I think you've missed the point.
I think that making anything a standard that involves massive cpu computations or involves games in general would be a bad idea.
Do you reimplement qsort from scratch every time you write a new piece of code? Any function that provides a common functionality, regardless of nature, is a valid target for an API. Especially the ones that involve massive cpu computations, as they stand to reap the most benefit from concentrated, incremental optimization by many people.
I thought that there were already various libraries and systems to support ear poping sound on linux someting called ALSA or the like...
The best thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. -- Andrew Tanenbaum
Yes, there's a standard, but we want a standard cross-platform standard, so we don't have to code for three different nonstandard standards!
I bet the API is particularly suited towards Creative chipsets.
I doubt this, simply because 3D audio hardware is very nearly a commodity item today. You can play multiple sound sources in multiple locations in 3D space, optionally with a variety of mostly standard effects (echo, reverb, etc.).
Different hardware differs only in minor ways: the number of concurrent streams supported, the quality of the effects, and how much host CPU time is required. They don't vary much in their basic feature set, so there's not much to do in an API to favour one vendor over another.
I might be more skeptical if Aureal were the company involved, as the Vortex chipset supports some extra features (geometry based wavetracing) that the Creative hardware currently does not.
If they weren't making a profit *and* working towards breakeven at the $20 pricepoint, they wouldn't be selling at that price at all.
I'm curious to understand the bizarre logic that makes you think this.
The 'crippled' $20 product is a means to sell only a portion of their intellectual property. For $20 you get the benefit of their ATA66 R&D effort. For $65 you get the benefit of that plus the RAID R&D effort. This ability to charge incrementally for development effort is probably key to the profitability of the product line as a whole.
How they package that intellectual property is irrelevant. It simply turns out that it's cheaper to disable the RAID stuff than it is to fab two entirely different products.
It's not the first time this has happened, and it won't be the last, but they have no reason not to be selling the raid-enabled card for the $20 and forgetting the poor-brother mode one......
No reason! Sheesh. How about the R&D effort expended on the RAID capability? Should Promise be punished for engineering the card so that it could be modified to be a simple ATA controller? Is their $65 price point exhorbitant?
The cost of the parts for ANY piece of computer hardware is next to nil. The only thing that makes any hardware expensive is the R&D effort expended designing it. It doesn't strike me as unreasonable for them to charge extra for the ability to take advantage of the RAID capability.
Let's think about this, Zion was a city underground where people who were free of the Matrix lived right? It had to have been built by people who were around during the resistance against the machines, there's no way a few people who somehow slipped out of the matrix could have built that city.
Why not? I think that the idea of a few isolated accidental "reanimations" of human batteries is kinda compelling. Imagine the shock and horror of waking up in the Matrix "real world", but being entirely alone, instead of in the company of people who understand what's going on.
I'd be happy to see this as the story explained in the upcoming "prequel".
Why is this being done as a chat forum? I think that the slashdot interview format is much better for both participants. The slashdot community can frame some intelligent questions and moderate them to reflect the issues that we're most interested in, and Jamie can take time to respond intelligently to them.
Realtime chat is better used for a social event, not a forum for learning something.
You can't have continents without oceans to separate them. What are the oceans in this analogy? Continents imply that there are sections of the net with inhabitants that may never visit another section in their lifetime. When any site is a mere click away from any other site, this won't happen. Now if all you're trying to say is that it's possible to categorize sites into categories, and that some categories have more representation thatn others, well, duh. Have a look at this nifty site some time.
...it's $15 more than the regular VHS version. Why the dramatic difference? It looks like Lucas is screwing us over. To get the widescreen version, you have to get the Collector's Edition, which comes with a collector's book, 35mm filmstrip (?)...
Maybe it's a 35mm print of the film. That would justify the $15.:)
What's with this obsession with wood retro? Personally I think this "upgrade" takes a PalmPilot, which is a very sleek, cool-looking device, and makes it look like crap.
No kidding. It's like those people that use cedar when building a home instead of vinyl siding.
The web is not a system of point-to-point connections as you seem to believe -- it is a multiconnected network and I see no good reason to impose this huge constraint on it: that a page cannot contain information from more than one machine. To repeat myself, the web is meant to be a seamless whole.
This sounds a whole lot better as a slashdot comment than it really is when you're using the web. The 'seamless hyperconnected information space' that a single page formed from multiple machines might represent, is in reality a simple web page with six ads and an animated cursor, all firing off demographic information to various companies. It's only because we've gotten used to it that this seems reasonable at all. If the typical ad-banner page as we know it today had appeared in 1993, people would have been screaming bloody murder about privacy (and 'commercialism', for that matter, but THAT battle is long since lost).
A "trust realm" scheme suffers from the usual defect: who will define the trust? I, as a user, certainly don't want to be bothered with it...
See my other post with a proposed technical solution. I don't think it would be all that tedious. But of course, it would have to be an option for the more picky users among us.
Personally I'd far rather have an Internet that provided no technological means for me to stop this sort of thing, than an Internet that was restrictive and full of rules and regulations.
It's not an 'Internet' issue -- it's a browser issue.
I can see a technical solution for this problem in my head right now. It wouldn't be detrimental to anyone, and would allow users to control what their browsers are doing for them.
OK, here goes:
First, let the user turn on the 'explicit hosts only' checkbox to 'on' from the default 'off'. There, any issue people have with 'breaking the web as we know it' is irrelevant. It's optional.
Go to your favourite page. (slashdot of course!) The browser runs off to slashdot.org to grab the page.
The browser finds an IMG tag with an SRC of http://209.207.224.245/Slashdot/pc.gif?/comments.p l,3713971. That's not the same host as the page I explicitly asked for!
A prompt pops up. "Do you want to add 209.207.224.245 to slashdot.org's trust realm?" Meaning, any request to slashdot.org will also allow 'incident' requests to 209.207.224.245. I say 'yes' because I like pretty pictures. OR, I say 'no' because where the hell is 209.207.224.245 anyway, and why should my machine go there if I didn't ask it to? Repeat for all such 'incident requests'. The browser remembers my answers, and doesn't bother asking again.
I'm afraid that this solution, to quote somebody's sig is simple, elegant and wrong. Looking at tcpdump output is still the preferred way to handle these issues.
Asking the average user to do this to ensure security is of course ludicrous.
What you propose would kill all web pages that pull content from more than one machine and that is a Bad Thing.
A bad thing for whom? Doubleclick or the user? What I propose is that I have direct control over the network activity that my machine is initiating. I take issue with the implication that my browser should be a black box that is free to perform arbitrary network connections on my behalf. THAT is a Bad Thing, IMHO.
The solution may be more complex, of course. Instead of a simple 'explicit host only' solution, a 'trust realm' scheme may be effective. Perhaps by domain; at least then you have some assurance that the same party is responsible for all the content that you're requesting.
We've gotten used to the idea that on any given page, your browser may well be asked to connect to some random third party machine. I don't think it's a good thing.
We really need to get a group together that specialized in detecting this kind of activity. You know that it's going to get harder to detect this kind of activity as the network evolves.
Detecting this kind of activity should be trivial. A nice feature for browsers (or any other net-aware software) would be to have an 'honor only explicit requests' mode, which would allow the browser to open connections only to the host that you've specified. No remote images, no remote IFRAME pages, no extraneous sockets opened up in applets or other embedded controls. I think this would neatly solve all sorts of network security problems. (As well as all sorts of advertizing 'problems'.)
Why should your browser be connecting to machines that you didn't ask it to?
Re:I really don't believe in this whole Zen concep
on
Interface Zen
·
· Score: 3
There is not logical notion that human kind has any implied fuzzy quasi-telepathic state wherin they gain "mystical" powers.
It's not mystical at all. It has nothing to do with telepathy. But I can tell you that the brain seems to enter a very different state when it is focusing on certain tasks. It happens to me often when I code and when I play videogames.
IANANeurologist, but I would guess that 'zenning' is the process of shutting down portions of the hundreds of inputs that the brain manages from moment to moment. You're allocating mental resources to the problem at hand, rather than wasting them on trivia like maintaining an awareness of your environment, checking for bodily requirements like food, water, or sleep, or even keeping your eyeballs moist. It stands to reason that ignoring these distractions will allow the brain to run at a faster, more productive pace.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're already happy watching grainy, low-res video with washed out colors, do you really care that the brightness goes up and down the whole time?
I have a large collection of high-quality, digital audio recordings on CD. Is there a way that I can transfer these pristine recordings to a lossy, low-quality, non-random-access, fragile, progressively degrading magnetic medium? Something like audio cassettes would be ideal.
Oh, and if these stereo recordings can be converted to mono during the process, so much the better.
The ethernet is to make using it with a cable-modem easy. Most of those use 10Mb, so this has to support them.
The price difference between 10/100 and straight 100 Mb chipsets is trivial anyway, there's no reason to not support both.
X! Sheesh. Forget X, if we're going to get rid of a letter, let's start with the bloody useless C. It has two pronunciations, both of which are handled already by another letter.
Look to the Indonesian national language, Bahasa Indonesia: they've done a smart thing and reassigned C to the 'ch' sound. We should just follow through and reassign X to 'sh'. And while we're at it, annex Y and use it for 'th'. Bingo: we've gotten rid of three useless letters and made "h" mostly unambiguous.
Yeah! It's a very flexible windowing system, and has stood the test of time.
I'm sure that the organization would be happy to sell you the hardware for that price. They would probably include for free in the offer the responsibility for whatever ridiculous debt they've accumulated.
Where did you hear this?
The economics of game consoles are pretty well understood now. You have to build the box yourself and sell it at a significant loss, and make up the difference selling licenses and producing 1st party games. You can't attempt to even break even on the box, or it'll be way too expensive.
The only company I can recall that's tried a different model is 3DO, and all the companies involved in that (I think Panasonic was the only company to make a box. Creative made a PC card version) got burned pretty badly.
> beginning of a true cross platform 3D audio
> system. Hopefully it provides more functionality
> than Microsofts proprietary single platfrom DirectAudio(?)
> system, otherwise it will be hard to get companies to switch over.
I don't see the benefit of doing something like that when you can just have standard sound from multiple speakers. Just take one speaker and put in on one side of the room and another and the other then you have sterophonic sound. Largely unless the sounds are intensely more complex your mind will associate the sound comming from different sources and allow for the "3d" effect.
Huh? So 3D sound isn't necessary, so we don't need an API? I think you've missed the point.
I think that making anything a standard that involves massive cpu computations or involves games in general would be a bad idea.
Do you reimplement qsort from scratch every time you write a new piece of code? Any function that provides a common functionality, regardless of nature, is a valid target for an API. Especially the ones that involve massive cpu computations, as they stand to reap the most benefit from concentrated, incremental optimization by many people.
I thought that there were already various libraries and systems to support ear poping sound on linux someting called ALSA or the like...
The best thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. -- Andrew Tanenbaum
Yes, there's a standard, but we want a standard cross-platform standard, so we don't have to code for three different nonstandard standards!
I doubt this, simply because 3D audio hardware is very nearly a commodity item today. You can play multiple sound sources in multiple locations in 3D space, optionally with a variety of mostly standard effects (echo, reverb, etc.).
Different hardware differs only in minor ways: the number of concurrent streams supported, the quality of the effects, and how much host CPU time is required. They don't vary much in their basic feature set, so there's not much to do in an API to favour one vendor over another.
I might be more skeptical if Aureal were the company involved, as the Vortex chipset supports some extra features (geometry based wavetracing) that the Creative hardware currently does not.
I'm curious to understand the bizarre logic that makes you think this.
The 'crippled' $20 product is a means to sell only a portion of their intellectual property. For $20 you get the benefit of their ATA66 R&D effort. For $65 you get the benefit of that plus the RAID R&D effort. This ability to charge incrementally for development effort is probably key to the profitability of the product line as a whole.
How they package that intellectual property is irrelevant. It simply turns out that it's cheaper to disable the RAID stuff than it is to fab two entirely different products.
No reason! Sheesh. How about the R&D effort expended on the RAID capability? Should Promise be punished for engineering the card so that it could be modified to be a simple ATA controller? Is their $65 price point exhorbitant?
The cost of the parts for ANY piece of computer hardware is next to nil. The only thing that makes any hardware expensive is the R&D effort expended designing it. It doesn't strike me as unreasonable for them to charge extra for the ability to take advantage of the RAID capability.
Why not? I think that the idea of a few isolated accidental "reanimations" of human batteries is kinda compelling. Imagine the shock and horror of waking up in the Matrix "real world", but being entirely alone, instead of in the company of people who understand what's going on.
I'd be happy to see this as the story explained in the upcoming "prequel".
Realtime chat is better used for a social event, not a forum for learning something.
[Extended rambling deleted]
How did this inane rec.pets.cats post get redirected to slashdot?
In my day, we were lucky to get some suit in to give a lame half-recruiting half-technical talk on technology we knew better than him...
You can't have continents without oceans to separate them. What are the oceans in this analogy? Continents imply that there are sections of the net with inhabitants that may never visit another section in their lifetime. When any site is a mere click away from any other site, this won't happen. Now if all you're trying to say is that it's possible to categorize sites into categories, and that some categories have more representation thatn others, well, duh. Have a look at this nifty site some time.
(Score: -1, Flamebait, Troll)
Maybe it's a 35mm print of the film. That would justify the $15. :)
No kidding. It's like those people that use cedar when building a home instead of vinyl siding.
He used his time to make something beautiful.
In my book that qualifies as time well spent.
This sounds a whole lot better as a slashdot comment than it really is when you're using the web. The 'seamless hyperconnected information space' that a single page formed from multiple machines might represent, is in reality a simple web page with six ads and an animated cursor, all firing off demographic information to various companies. It's only because we've gotten used to it that this seems reasonable at all. If the typical ad-banner page as we know it today had appeared in 1993, people would have been screaming bloody murder about privacy (and 'commercialism', for that matter, but THAT battle is long since lost).
A "trust realm" scheme suffers from the usual defect: who will define the trust? I, as a user, certainly don't want to be bothered with it...
See my other post with a proposed technical solution. I don't think it would be all that tedious. But of course, it would have to be an option for the more picky users among us.
It's not an 'Internet' issue -- it's a browser issue.
I can see a technical solution for this problem in my head right now. It wouldn't be detrimental to anyone, and would allow users to control what their browsers are doing for them.
OK, here goes:
Comments?
Asking the average user to do this to ensure security is of course ludicrous.
What you propose would kill all web pages that pull content from more than one machine and that is a Bad Thing.
A bad thing for whom? Doubleclick or the user? What I propose is that I have direct control over the network activity that my machine is initiating. I take issue with the implication that my browser should be a black box that is free to perform arbitrary network connections on my behalf. THAT is a Bad Thing, IMHO.
The solution may be more complex, of course. Instead of a simple 'explicit host only' solution, a 'trust realm' scheme may be effective. Perhaps by domain; at least then you have some assurance that the same party is responsible for all the content that you're requesting.
We've gotten used to the idea that on any given page, your browser may well be asked to connect to some random third party machine. I don't think it's a good thing.
Detecting this kind of activity should be trivial. A nice feature for browsers (or any other net-aware software) would be to have an 'honor only explicit requests' mode, which would allow the browser to open connections only to the host that you've specified. No remote images, no remote IFRAME pages, no extraneous sockets opened up in applets or other embedded controls. I think this would neatly solve all sorts of network security problems. (As well as all sorts of advertizing 'problems'.)
Why should your browser be connecting to machines that you didn't ask it to?
It's not mystical at all. It has nothing to do with telepathy. But I can tell you that the brain seems to enter a very different state when it is focusing on certain tasks. It happens to me often when I code and when I play videogames.
IANANeurologist, but I would guess that 'zenning' is the process of shutting down portions of the hundreds of inputs that the brain manages from moment to moment. You're allocating mental resources to the problem at hand, rather than wasting them on trivia like maintaining an awareness of your environment, checking for bodily requirements like food, water, or sleep, or even keeping your eyeballs moist. It stands to reason that ignoring these distractions will allow the brain to run at a faster, more productive pace.